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Monitoring parliaments

Parliamentary monitoring websites are great for citizens. But they’re not the easiest technology to build.

Good parliamentary monitoring sites allow citizens to keep an eye on the people in power. They make it easy to find out who represents you, what’s being debated, and how members have voted.

But hard work goes into presenting that kind of information simply and clearly. Such sites require complex databases of politicians, which can be easily updated when elections take place.

They need a way to collect and publish out the written record of debates.

And to be really effective, they need to match users to their constituencies, so people can see quickly and easily who represents them.

The solution

Luckily, mySociety has much experience in obtaining and sharing such data in a format that’s ultra-simple for developers to use; we also have useful software and code to help partners get their parliamentary sites up and running.

Our help can remove the need for extensive software development and leave campaigners to get on with the day-to-day tasks of running the website.

People and places

A debates page displayed on a parliamentary monitoring site

At the core of many parliamentary monitoring sites is a structured database of politicians that links elected representatives to the places they represent, the parties of which they are a member, and the roles they perform.

All you need to do is provide the data — or check EveryPolitician if you don’t have it available — and we’ll help you display a page for each politician, as well as cutting the data in various ways to populate other areas of your site.

The words they speak

MPs who attended the same college

A second database stores parliamentary transcripts, with speeches ascribed to the individual speakers. Your users can search the entire database, so they can read up on recent debates or ones going back into the past. This database also allows you to do nifty things, like display on a politician’s page how often a they have spoken in parliament and what they have said.

Matching users to constituencies

Boundary information (stored in our boundary mapping service, MapIt) allows users to input their location, and discover the elected politicians who represent them. This feature is a very powerful way to ensure that content is relevant, even for people who do not know much about Parliament or its workings.

Spreading the message

Finally, we can help deploy integration with major social media channels, with tools that allow users to comment on and socially share individual pages, Twitter streams on the home page and a blog for your news items and infographics.

Implementations

We’ve helped partners to build and run sites in Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Between them, they are providing an insight into their countries’ parliaments to hundreds of thousands of citizens every month.

TheyWorkForYou is mySociety’s UK parliamentary monitoring site, which inspired the creation of Pombola.

A parliamentary monitoring site for your country?

Our software is free for anyone to use. If you are interested in using it to set up a site for your country, the first thing you should do is get in touch.

The code is freely available, but we’d like to give you a little guidance before you get started. We want to make sure you have all the latest information, updates and support as you set up your parliamentary monitoring site.

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mySociety

mySociety is a not-for-profit social enterprise, based in the UK but working with partners internationally. We build and share digital technologies that give people the power to get things changed, across the three areas of Democracy, Freedom of Information, and Better Cities.